Stories by Esther Shein

Drones are on more people’s radars lately—so to speak—and that got Babson College MBA candidate Abby Speicher and her business partners thinking about a possible opportunity: providing training to public safety departments related to these unmanned aerial vehicles.
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Boston’s three public safety agencies are expecting to see significant improvements in response time and more efficient communications, thanks to the city’s new computer-aided 911 dispatch system deployed earlier this month.
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Matt Guthmiller, a 19-year-old freshman at MIT, is combining his passion for computer science with his love of flying by taking a 28,000-mile solo flight around the world later this month. If he succeeds, he will become the youngest person ever to circumnavigate the globe on a solo flight.

Navigating a city like Manhattan is relatively straightforward, given that all the streets run parallel or at right angles, but all bets are off when it comes to more organic cities like Cambridge, which tend to have more curves and constraints.
MIT’s maze-like Stata Center is a prime example of where the “Manhattan Assumption,” which assumes all planes are parallel or oriented in the same direction, can’t be applied, says Julian Straub, a second-year MIT graduate student. So to make it easier for robots navigate non-standard landscapes, Straub developed an algorithm to identify the major orientations in 3D scenes. Read More